Wenshan Review of Literature and Culture．Vol 6.1．December 2012．71-102.
Affinity and Difference between
Japanese Cinema and Taiyu pian
through a Comparative Study of
Japanese and Taiyu pian
Melodramas
Chun-chi Wang
ABSTRACT
The foundational infrastructure of the Taiwanese film
industry is generally viewed as having being established during
the period of Japanese colonization, when the Japanese colonial
government in Taiwan recognized film’s potential for
disseminating propaganda to promote the realization of
assimilation (dōka). In the 1960s Taiwan, the popularity of
Japanese films sometimes outranked that of those imported from
Hollywood, Shanghai, and Hong Kong, both during and after
the colonial period. Film historians of taiyu pian, or
Taiwanese-dialect cinema, have argued that the adoption of
many of the conventions of Japanese cinema reflected a
consequence of colonization, and that this indirectly boosted the
popularity of Taiwanese-dialect cinema in the 1950s and the
1960s, since its main audience consisted primarily of the
ex-colonized. While the influence of Japanese cinema was
undeniably profound, it would be simplistic to categorize
Taiwanese-dialect cinema as merely post-colonial. This paper
proposes a rethinking of the affinity between Japanese cinema
and taiyu pian by comparing Japanese melodramatic cinema and
its Taiwanese-dialect adaptations. I argue that taiyu pian
deviates from its Japanese predecessor by addressing the

This paper is part of a research study on the representations of gender and sexualtiy in Taiyu
pian, sponsored by the National Science Council (NSC 98-2410-H-259-075-MY2). A previous
draft of this paper was presented at the conference of “Taiwan Cinema Before Taiwan New
Cinema” held at National Chung-Hsing University in 2011. A second revision in English was
presented at Asian Cinema Studies Conference in 2012. The authors would like to acknowledge
the helpful suggestions of the participants of the two conferences. Much appreciation goes to
two anonymous reviewers for their valuable remarks that patently improve this work.
* Received: May 17, 2012; Accepted: September 20, 2012
Chun-chi Wang, Assistant Professor, Department of English, National Dong Hwa
University, Hualien, Taiwan
E-mail: chunchiwang@mail.ndhu.edu.tw
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culturally specific experiences of modernity in Taiwan and by
incorporating other international cinemas to enhance its
competitiveness. This comparative study challenges the
assumed predominance of the colonial legacy that has exerted a
strong influence on the construction of the history of
Taiwanese-dialect cinema and reveals the social and political
factors that affect the decisions on what to adopt and what to
modify.
KEYWORDS: Taiyu pian, Taiwanese-dialect cinema, Japanese
cinema, melodrama, modernity, women in film
Affinity and Difference between Japanese Cinema and Taiyu pian
台語電影與日本電影的
親密與殊異：
以電影通俗劇的比較分析為例
王君琦
摘
要
台灣電影的放映基礎始於日治時期，但在製作上的參
與卻是鳳毛麟角；戰後台灣的電影製作，則由民間產製的台
語電影帶動。台語電影除了以歌仔戲與民間故事為題材之
外，也大規模的翻拍日本電影。因此，迄今有關台語電影的
研究普遍咸認為台語電影本身即是殖民遺緒的展現，並將日
本電影之所以成為台語電影主要摹仿對象的現象歸因於殖
民歷史所造成的文化相近性。本文透過比較日本電影與台語
電影的通俗劇類型（以家庭倫理與愛情文藝為敘事主軸），
從兩者的異同之處重新檢驗單從殖民歷史的脈絡論述台語
電影型塑的侷限，並論證日本電影僅是採取文化食人主義途
徑的台語電影的其中一個素材來源，但不是唯一亦非主要，
台語電影事實上也受到其他如好萊塢電影的影響。本文也將
指出台語電影對現代性、性別、家庭等主題不同於日本電影
的更動緊緊鑲嵌於 1960 年代的戰後台灣的社會脈絡。
關鍵詞：日本電影、台語電影、通俗劇、現代性、女性再現

王君琦，東華大學英美語文學系助理教授。
E-mail: chunchiwang@mail.ndhu.edu.tw
73
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From its inception, Taiwan’s film industry has been politically,
culturally, and economically intertwined with that of Japan. The novelty of
cinema as a new form of entertainment has intrigued the Taiwanese people
since it was introduced into Taiwanese culture during the Japanese colonial
era.1 The foundation of the film industry was established as a concomitant
effect of the colonial project of education and indoctrination through film. The
earliest film production activity was launched by Toyojirou Takamatsu, who
was hired by the Commissioner of Civil Affairs Shinpei Goto and was
responsible for setting up the preliminary distribution system and expanding
the exhibition venues (Ye, Rizhi shiqi 67–72). By 1925, cinema had become
one of the most popular forms of entertainment on the island of Taiwan
(Mamie 290). 2 Production-wise, it was during the colonial period that
Taiwanese began to become involved in filmmaking in collaboration with
Japanese crews that launched feature films and documentary productions in
Taiwan in the early 1920s.3 The locals, however, were only allowed limited
access to film production knowledge and resources (Mamie 367; Chiu 83),
even in the cases where Taiwanese sponsors provided financial support.4
It was also during the colonial era that Taiwanese elites traveled to
Japan to receive training in filmmaking through formal education or
apprenticeships at major studios such as Schochiku and Toho. The personal
affiliations of film professionals with Japan are among the reasons why
1
The currently available historical evidence shows that the first cinématographe screening took place
in 1900. A French film organization commissioned a Japanese wood businessman to hold the event,
and the technician Shozo Matsuura was responsible for running the screening. However, it is still
plausible that screenings occurred before this date ( Mamie 272).
2
According to Misawa Mamie’s research, cinema was an accessible form of entertainment to people
in Taipei in the mid-1910s and had become more popular than theater by the year of 1925. However,
cinema was never the dominant form of entertainment across the island during the Japanese colonial
period.
3
The first feature film made in Taiwan by Shochiku’s Kamata Studio was Eyes of the Buddha (dir.
King Tanaka, 1922). It was the first film project that involved Taiwanese, Liu Xi-yang and Huang
Liang-meng, who worked as actors, (Y. Zhang 116; Ye, Rizhi Shiqi 163). The first film in which
Taiwanese people participated in the production process as crew members was Merciless God (director
unknown, 1923) (Du 3).
4
The first co-production between Japanese and Taiwanese locals with Taiwanese sponsorship was Wu
Feng, The Righteous Man (dir. Ando Talo and Jiba Hiroki, 1932). It is a story that glorifies the Han
people’s attempt to civilize the indigenous people (Du 5; Y. Zhang 116-117), and the project of
“co-production” of this film needs to be understood as occurring in a colonial context where it was
used by the colonial government an as ideological conveyance to aggravate the local tensions between
the indigenous people and the Han people.
Affinity and Difference between Japanese Cinema and Taiyu pian
75
postwar Taiwan’s Holo-dialect films (taiyu pian hereafter) are generally
considered to have inherited their legacy from Japanese films. Taiyu pian
refers to films in which the language spoken is Holo-dialect and that were
launched in the mid-1950s and continued to flourish throughout the 1960s.
The 16mm film Liu caizi xixiangji (Six Scholars in the West Chamber, dir.
Shao Lo-hui, 1955) was the first postwar taiyu pian with a theatrical release,
but it was a box office flop. In fixing the problems of adapting a stage play
into a film, as seen in Six Scholars, Ho Ji-ming’s Xue pinggui yu Wong
baochuan (1956) broke box office records and encouraged more people to get
involved in making taiyu pian. For almost a decade, taiyu pian reigned
supreme in the domestic film production, but began to show signs of lethargy
in the late 1960s. Although the production of taiyu pian decreased
dramatically in the 1970s, it did not entirely vanish. Throughout the history of
taiyu pian production, it is those made in the 1950s and the 1960s that reveal a
close relationship with Japanese cinema and are discussed in this paper. The
directors of the first two taiyupian, Shao Lo-hui and Ho Ji-ming, were both
educated in this way. Shao received his filmmaking and screenwriting
education at the Imperial Film and Theater School in Tokyo and was later
contracted to act at Shochiku. Ho received an even more thorough training5
and worked as a camera assistant to Suzuki Kiyoji (Ye, “Zhengzong taiyu
pian” 133–141).
In the 1960s, critics tended to attribute taiyu pian’s thematic and
stylistic proximity to Japanese films to the imperative of satisfying viewers
consisting primarily of the ex-colonized who favored Japanese films (Yu,
“Ripan jinkou” 6). This point of view was further validated by the fact that the
box office performance of taiyu pian was in inverse proportion to the
availability of Japanese films, which was dependent on diplomatic relations
and a quota system. Some critics even argued that taiyu pian’s blind imitation
of Japanese films hampered their cinematic novelty and accounted for the
gradual insipidity and staleness of the taiyu pian industry (Yao, “Taiyu pian”
6). Contemporary film historians of the modern age have generally agreed
with the film critics of the time that there was too much obtuse copying and
too little artistry in taiyu pian. Such a standpoint supports the argument that
taiyu pian passively mimicked Japanese films as a consequence of
5
Ho attended the Tokyo Professional School of Photography (now Tokyo Polytechnic University),
Tama Arts University, and the Tokyo TEL Film Institute.
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colonization (Huang 242–243; Ye, Riben dianying 11–16, 54).
Although the influence of Japanese films is undeniably part of the
colonial legacy, to conclude that taiyu pian and its popularity reflect a
neocolonial mindset would be the result of a slanted historiography that
conceals other pertinent historical factors such as American cultural
imperialism, the Cold War, and the Nationalist Party’s hegemonic
nation-building project. From the perspective of the international film market,
the development of taiyu pian was significantly affected by the postwar global
power of Hollywood, Japanese cinema, and Hong Kong-made Chinese
language and Amoy-dialect films. The import of Chinese language and
Amoy-dialect films made in Hong Kong were strongly encouraged by the
KMT government as a way to ascertain the support of overseas Chinese
communities. This explains why the linguistically identical Amoy-dialect
films were sanctioned for import while the production of taiyu pian was
banned until the mid- 1950s (Taylor 95). Taiyu pian must be understood as “a
node within a network” (23), as described by Michel Foucault, that is gridded
by a system of references including, but not limited to, Japanese cinema. As a
peripheral regional cinema tried to rival other (inter)national cinemas, taiyu
pian incorporated whatever established conventions it could grasp in order to
be appealing and competitive. 6 As the films of a “contact zone” 7 that
incorporate the language and ideology of the dominant cinemas and thus are
constantly in dialogue with them, this paper argues that taiyu pian adopted a
similar cannibalistic approach to Brazilian Cinema Novo. Cultural
cannibalism in the Bakhtinian sense means to incorporate various external and
indigenous influences in such a manner so as to devour everything local,
national, colonial and global in order to achieve an impure, but distinctive,
form of expression (King 23). Taiyu pian did not ideologically intend to create
a self-identity by strategically reversing European colonial discourse as in the
case of Brazilian Cinema Novo, nor did it emblematize the mimesis of
otherness. Nevertheless, taiyu pian fused and hybridized its native cultural
specificities with foreign elements.
6
For example, Laurel and Hardy were the prototype of the comedy double acts Brother Wang and
Brother Liu; the tramp look and slapstick jokes of Charlie Chaplin were duplicated in the Wen Xia
series, such as in Goodbye Taipei (1969); the adaptation of “popular tales of ancient days” in early
taiyu pian was already a convention in its Amoy counterpart.
7
cf. Mary Louise Pratt, “Arts of the Contact Zone,” Profession 91. NY: MLA, 1991.
Affinity and Difference between Japanese Cinema and Taiyu pian
77
Taking notice of the references besides those of Japanese cinema that
make up the hybrid quality of taiyu pian inexorably entails rethinking the
ostensible intimacy between taiyu pian and Japanese cinema. This nuanced
comparative study attempts to demythologize the assumed omnipresent and
capillary power of the colonial influence that is said to incessantly mesmerize
its ex-colonized people in shaping of the nature of their cinema. Since it is
impossible to unravel the relationships between taiyu pian and all other
international cinemas in one paper, this research will focus on analyzing how
taiyu pian negotiated with and deviated from the Japanese paradigm, which
simultaneously marks the specificities of the subcultures of the former
colonial subject. The influence of Japanese films is inexpugnable, but is
neither overpowering nor decisive.
The deviation from the Japanese paradigm suggests that taiyu pian is a
product of the syncretism made possible by simultaneous borrowings from
multiple international cinemas, and at the same time that the differences
between taiyu pian and Japanese cinema are culturally symptomatic. The
unabashed yet incomplete plagiarism that often begets unsatisfactory levels of
sophistication in cinematic storytelling appears in relation to the different
degrees of tactical negotiations motivated by the political, social and cultural
contexts in Taiwan. In this manner, taiyu pian epitomizes what Miriam
Hansen terms “vernacular modernism,” for it encompasses various everyday
cultural practices and discourses that articulate and inflect the experience of
modernity and responds to that experience through locally- and
culturally-specific aesthetics (quoted in Russell, “Japanese Cinema” 18–24).
Given that the thriving period of taiyu pian occurred in tandem with the
rapid industrial-capitalist modernization of Taiwan in the late 1950s and
throughout the 1960s, melodrama forms the basis of this comparative study,
as it is argued to be a fundamentally modern cultural expression specific to the
experience of modern life (Singer 2; Gledhill, quoted in Russell, “Japanese
Cinema” 25). Peter Brooks defines melodrama as a “modern mode” that
locates and articulates the “moral occult” by recognizing and praising the sign
of virtue. This melodramatic modality can be applied to taiyu pian
melodrama8 and the gendai-geki genre of Japanese films (Russell, Classical
8
A close equivalent Chinese term for taiyu pian melodrama would be taiyu wenyi pian. However, I
avoid using wenyi as the term would open up further questions about cultural translation and
cross-cultural analysis. Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh notices the problem of the convenient but problematic
translation of wenyi to melodrama in her recent work on Chinese wenyi film. See “Pitfalls of
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Japanese Cinema 12). Both genres employ the form of melodrama to create a
secular system of ethics, seeking to offer a stable discourse to counter the
social anxiety arising when society undergoes rapid and contradictory
transformations. In the meantime, however, the modality of melodrama can
“translate particular aesthetic and narrative struggles and contradictions into
popular entertainment” (Russell, Classical Japanese Cinema 15). In the Asian
context, cinematic melodrama represents “a junction of tradition and
modernity, Eastern and Western sensibilities, voices of past and present”
(Dissanayake 5). Japanese melodrama deals with the themes of “the conflict
between feudal and democratic social values, the dilemma of social mobility,
and the power of the inevitable” (Russell, Classical Japanese Cinema 12),
which made it a fitting model to address the social anxieties resulting from the
full-scale modernization of Taiwan. However, taiyu pian’s digression from the
Japanese paradigm brings to light a locally understood and defined experience
of modernity as well as other plausible cultural influences on taiyu pian.
Both the Japanese and taiyu pan melodramas discussed in my
comparison are set in modern times with female protagonists who are central
to the story.9 When women are central to the “melodramatic imagination” in
film, such type of film is often designated as the “woman’s film,” as these
films tend to address the female spectator. It is the so-called “Japanese
woman’s film” that was most often referred to by producers or filmmakers of
taiyu pian as their source of inspiration and model for emulation. Yet, it was
often mentioned in a broadly descriptive way, even though some taiyu pian
have the same titles as some famous Japanese woman’s films, such as What is
Your Name? (Qingwen fangming, dir. Kao Jen-he, 1964), presumably a
remake of Kimi no namae Wa? (dir. Ooba Hideo, 1953) and Golden Demon
(Jinse yecha, dir. Lin Fu-di, 1964), that of Konjiki yasha (Koji Shima, 1954).
Cross-Cultural Analysis: Chinese Wenyi Film and Melodrama.” Asian Journal of Communication 19.4
(2009): 438-452.
9
Another possible category to refer to this type of film is “woman’s film” (josei eiga), which is a
descriptive term in the context of Japanese cinema, referring to films about women that center on the
female protagonist in most cases. However, “woman’s film” has been used as a critical term as well,
and it is often associated with several Japanese auteur directors such as Kenji Mizoguchi, Mikio
Naruse, Yasujirō Ozu, and Keisuke Kinoshita. Yet, since my purpose in this paper is not to discuss the
cinematic treatment of women’s issues in any particular work of these auteur directors, I choose to
look at the genre of melodrama set in contemporary life (gendai-geki) in a broader sense to avoid
further confusions. In addition, the use of melodrama is closer to that of Isolde Standish’s analysis
which is discussed at some length in this paper.
Affinity and Difference between Japanese Cinema and Taiyu pian
79
Nevertheless, the current unavailability of these titles makes it difficult to
verify whether they are direct remakes of the original Japanese films.
Moreover, since the same story of the adapted film was often made into
different film versions in different periods of time, but under the same title, it
is rather challenging to determine which version the taiyu pian counterpart
may be said to be modeled after. The tendency of taiyu pian’s cultural
cannibalism makes it even more difficult, as whatever source was available
could be poached for taiyu pian to be made their own. Therefore, the use of
“woman’s film” in this paper is not and cannot be as precise as it should be,
especially given the fact that there have been several emergences of woman’s
film in Japanese film history across a large time span. Nevertheless, Mitsuyo
Wada-Marciano also reminds us that the lineage of Japanese woman’s films
has to be traced back to Shochiku’s prewar woman’s film (19). The underlying
message suggests shared parameters under the umbrella term of “woman’s
film” despite the idiosyncrasies of each emergence of woman’s film and of
each director’s personal touch.
The case study undertaken in this comparative study is that of The
Unusual Love (dir. Zheng Dong-shan, 1964) and the two versions of the
Japanese film that is believed to inspire it, Aizen Katsura a.k.a. The
Love-Troth Tree—the director’s cut edition by Hiromasa Nomura in 1938 and
a remake by Noboru Hakamura in 1962—for these films are some of the most
readily accessible early film texts that have a direct link with each other.
Furthermore, they are believed to spring from a common source (C. Zhang
52). 10 Two other reasons that make Nomura and Hakamura’s versions
commensurate with The Unusual Love is the great popularity of Nomura’s
version since its release in the colonial era and the contemporaneity of
10
The original story of The Love-Troth Tree was adapted from a popular serial novel by Kawaguchi
Matsutaro under the same title in a woman’s magazine. The story was made into a film series by
Hiromasa Nomura in Shochiku. The first one was released in 1938 and the latter two in 1939. Later,
Nomura re-cut these three films into one single film. The same story was made into a film again in
1948 and in 1954 by Daiei directors Seiji Hisamatsu and Keigo Kimura, respectively. In 1962, Noboru
Hakamura in Shochiku made another film series with two entries out of the same story again.
Although Hakamura’s version was made in the same period as that of The Unusual Love, the wide
popularity of Nomura’s version in 1938 has to be taken into account. According to a survey in 2005
that asked people who had lived through the colonial period about their favorite Japanese film,
Nomura’s version ranks the first (Huang 261). It is noteworthy that all of the Japanese versions of The
Love-Troth Tree have the same narrative structure of “just miss,” but this structure is not employed in
the taiyupian version directed by Zheng Dongshan.
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Hakamura’s version and The Unusual Love.11 The omission of two other
versions of Aizen Katsura made by Seiji Hisamatsu and Keigo Kimura,
respectively in 1948 and 1954, due to the current unavailability of the texts on
the one hand shows a limitation of this research. On the other hand, the
omission signals that the influence of Japanese cinema on the taiyu pian
industry is largely under-researched, and some of the argument of this paper is
expected to undergo revision when more research findings emerge. Most of
the comparisons in this paper are based on scholarly accounts that summarize
the narrative and cinematic techniques of Japanese film melodramas and my
own characterization of taiyu pian. In addition to reconsidering the assumed
affinity between Japanese film melodrama and taiyu pian melodrama, this
paper intends to look at taiyu pian melodrama in a systematic way to better
understand how they mediated the experiences of modernity in Taiwan in the
1960s.
Envisioning the West through the Japanese Lens
Although Japanese cinema dominated the prewar film culture in Taiwan,
after the war, its power was dependent on its relationship with the Nationalist
Party under the leadership of Chiang Kai-Shek, who led the fight against
Japan’s aggressive invasion of China during the Pacific War. Immediately
after the war, the Nationalist Party banned Japanese film imports, with one
exception: previously imported films were still permitted if they passed the
censorship screening. The procedure was later streamlined upon the request of
exhibitors, who were impatient with the long and tedious censorship process.
By the end of 1946, all of the Japanese films that had been imported before
the war had been shown, and subsequently, Shanghai films dominated the box
office until around 1948, when high-quality Hollywood films began to, and
continued to, dominate Taiwan’s film market (Ye, Riben dianying 26).
The exchange of films was used as a means of diplomatic negotiation
during the Cold War. As Japan gained strength in the anti-Communist
coalition led by the United States in East- and Southeast Asia, the antagonism
between Japan and the Chiang administration began to decrease.
11
Zhang Chang-yan’s research also points out the great similarity between The Unusual Love and the
1962 version of The Love-Troth Tree in terms of the character’s names, the use of music, and some of
the plotlines (52). It is also important to note that The Unusual Love was first a stage play adapted
from the 1962 film version of The Love-Troth Tree before it was made into a film.
Affinity and Difference between Japanese Cinema and Taiyu pian
81
Anti-Communist, scientifically informative, and democratic-spirited Japanese
films were imported in May 1950 under the supervision of the Allies (Huang
285; Ye, Riben dianying 45). Japanese cinema’s re-entry into the film market
in Taiwan in the early 1950s took place around the same time when Japanese
cinema was expanding its market to the U.S. and neighboring Asian and
Southeast Asian countries. This was part of a project for “Legitimizing
Cosmopolitianism” of Japan, where the national horizon was extended into
the international arena (Tezuka 3). In a short period of time, the number of
Japanese films imported to Taiwan occupied 32% of Japan’s total film exports
(Ye, Riben dianying 51). In exchange, the Japanese government allowed two
Chinese language films exclusively produced by the Republic of China in
Taiwan to be exported to Japan on an annual basis. In response to the lobbying
by Hong Kong distributors, the Japanese government loosened its import
restriction on so-called “Chinese films” to include all films produced in the
Mandarin language as well as those distributed by companies outside Taiwan.
This proposal was eventually aborted due to protest by the Chiang
administration, but the interaction of the Japanese film industry with Hong
Kong, as part of its project to internationalize the national identity and
nationalism of Japan, never ceased.12
The importation of Japanese films in the 1950s reflected the
contradictory role of Japan as the former colonizer and the present ally of
Taiwan. Twenty-four Japanese films were imported each year, which was in
accordance with the quota system established in 1952 and was much lower
than the number of Hollywood and British (later European) films. The
rationale behind the quota system was to limit the ascendency of foreign films
in general (Xie, “Ripan jinkou” 6), but the underlying goal of the limit placed
on the number of Japanese films imports was “decolonization.” The same
contradiction can be found in the establishment of the congenial diplomatic
relationship between Japan and Taiwan in 1952 and Japan’s status as the most
favored nation in the Sino-Japanese Peace Treaty that propelled commodity
trading between Taiwan and Japan on the one hand, but intensified the
apprehension about cultural invasion by Japan on the other. The quota system,
thus, became a feeble but indispensable scheme to keep the torrent of
12
The success of the Hong Kong-Japan co-productions of Yokihi (Princess Yang Kwei-fei) and Madam
White Snake launched the golden age of the cinematic interchange between Hong Kong and Japan
which lasted until the early 1970s (Yau, quoted in Tezuka 62).
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Japanese films at bay. In 1958, talks of a bilateral trading pact between Japan
and Communist China ignited an official resistance against Japan as the
Motion Picture Association of Taiwan announced a boycott of Japanese films.
Although the Japanese government eventually abandoned its attempt to
advance its interaction with Communist China, it retaliated against the boycott
by asking the Chiang administration to raise the quota for Japanese films to
thirty-four per year, two of which had to be selected by the semi-official
ROC-Japan Cooperation Council and be distributed through the state-owned
Central Pictures Corporation (Yu, “Ripan jinkou” 6).
The political tension between Taiwan, the People’s Republic of China
(P.R.C.), and Japan continued to affect the flow of film exchange. In 1963, the
importation of Japanese films was officially halted for two years, after the
Japanese government complied with the request of the P.R.C. to repatriate
Zhou Hong-qing, an anti-Communist who had fled to Japan, back to the
mainland, instead of to Taiwan. In May 1964, Prime Minister Shigeru Yoshida
visited Taiwan to make amends, and the ban on Japanese films was soon lifted
(Ye, Riben dianying 113). This short period of absence of Japanese cinema
made room for domestically produced films both in Mandarin and the Holo
dialect. These fledgling film industries were affected again by the return of
Japanese films in 1965, but the impact was not as great as in the first half of
the 1960s.
The conflicting attitudes toward Japanese film were also evident in the
divergence between the agony over its potential threat and the admiration of
its better production quality. Carrying the nationalist sentiment, many film
critics, producers, and directors criticized the importation of Japanese films as
detrimental to the production of domestic films (Ye, Riben dianying 115-122),
but it was still a common practice to produce films with the Japanese film
industry or recruit film professionals. In his analysis of the postwar Japanese
film industry’s engagement with other Asian countries, Yoshiharu Tezuka
corrects Kinnia Yau Shuk-ting, who regards this as a continuation of the
consolidation of Japanese imperialism during the Japanese imperial period.
Rather, Tezuka argues that the postwar relationship “subsumes the Asian film
industries within a Western sphere of influence,” and it is the look of Western
modernity and technological supremacy within Japanese cinema that made it a
role model for the film industries in other Asian countries (57-58). Tekuza’s
insight helps us understand the motive behind the Taiwanese film industry’s
Affinity and Difference between Japanese Cinema and Taiyu pian
83
avidity to work with the Japanese film industry, which seems contradictory to
the aim of mitigating the pernicious effects of colonialialism. As early as 1957,
the Chang-he Film Company invited Japanese director Yasunori Iwasawa to
work on its films, and Iwasawa joined a panel tasked with dispensing advice
on the future of taiyu pian.13 A year later, cinematographer Shiro Miyanishi
from Daiei, director Namio Yuasa, and cinematographer Gozo Matsui (a.k.a.
Shintarou Chujio) from Shintoho worked together on two taiyu pian: The
Station of a Mist Night (1966) and Man to Remember (1967). Both Yuasa and
Chujio later settled permanently in Taiwan to continue their careers in
filmmaking (Huang 236-242). Furthermore, in 1958, Ho Gi-ming brought
back CinemaScope equipment from Japan and used it to make a CinemaScope
taiyu pian (”Huaxing” 3). 14 The factors that led to the high international
reputation of Japanese films were probably the same factors that made them
popular in Taiwan: they used the latest Western filmmaking technologies to
portray a sophisticated version of specific cultural content.
Even filmmakers who migrated from China or Hong Kong to Taiwan
after the Civil War and thus lacked a colonial background, borrowed from
Japanese films at times. In 1962, the state-owned Central Motion Picture
Company (CMPC) initiated a series of co-productions with Daiei, Nikkatsu,
and Toho. These projects began with a research trip to Japan to learn color
cinematography techniques, funded by the International Cooperation
Administration established by the United States (Lin 72). In the context of the
Cold War, Japan was not deemed so much as a master, but a senior pupil, in
the process of acculturating to technologically-centered industrial
modernization. This revaluation of the role of the postwar Japanese film
industry in the 1950s and 1960s in Taiwan does not deny the power of the
colonial legacy; rather, it illuminates the entanglement between the
postcolonial and Cold War discourses. Gaining this understanding allows us to
examine how taiyu pian replicate Japanese classics beyond the frame of
reference of a postcolonial critique that exclusively addresses the lingering
effects of the colonial history.
13
14
See Investigative News (Zhengxin xinwen) 19 Aug. 1957: 3.
In the same year, CMPC also obtained a set of the Twentieth Century Fox patented CinemaScope,
passed on by Italian director R. Merusi after he finished shooting in Taiwan for his film La Grande
Muraglia with CMPC’s assistance (Lin 65-66).
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Contemplation over modernity
Melodrama is a genre that most explicitly represents the textual
duplication of Japanese film in taiyu pian. Sharing a similar rhetoric with
Hollywood melodrama, Japanese melodrama also delineates social crises in
personalized and emotional ways through the lens of the family (Elsaesser,
quoted in Mercer and Shingler 21). Appropriating Japanese melodrama
became a convenient device for taiyu pian melodrama to address the social
distress in postwar industrial Taiwan. In contrast to Hollywood melodrama
that considers the conflicts of middle-class families, taiyu pian melodrama
aligns with Japanese melodrama, which focuses on women as agents in a
narrative to deal with the confrontation between tradition and modernity.
Hong Guo-Juin argues, “Modernization, the prescriptive path of
nation-building, is precisely the ‘circumstances’ that impose themselves on
their subjects’ fate” (56). Therefore, it is understandable why early Shochiku
films that focused on the female encounter with modernity by way of
modanizuma 15 would be the model for describing the excitement and
paradoxical anxiety over the eventual meteoric rise of full-scaled industrial
capitalism in Taiwan in the 1950s and 1960s. As the first film studio in Japan,
the Shochiku Kinema Company created a cinematic exemplification of and
response to the rapid modernization of Japanese society (Standish 37). Not
only did its films display new technologies and Americanized methods of
cinematic storytelling, they directly spoke to and of Japan’s contradictory
experience of modernity. At the center of this cinematic expression of
Japanese modernity is the genre of woman’s film that dominated Shochiku’s
productions in the 1920s and 1930s, in which women were the corporeal
catalysts that embodied the transition and were inscribed with its impact.
These films tackle issues related to the rural-urban binary, the conflict
between feudal social traditions and the changing reality of industrial
capitalism, and the resistance against Confucian class divisions by way of
individual effort and accomplishment (Standish 31). The launch of Shochiku’s
woman’s films was directly linked to the emergence of Japanese women as
consumer subjects in the public sphere (Wada-Marciano 19). The studio head,
15
Isolde Standish notes that a differentiation between the katakana neologism modanizumu and the
kanji phrase of kindaishugi was made in the 1920s and 1930s where the former refers to a more
general structure of feeling about the advent of industrial capitalism and the latter is associated with
European rationalism in the intellectual/academic sense (2006, 32).
Affinity and Difference between Japanese Cinema and Taiyu pian
85
Shiro Kido, who restructured the studio under a Hollywood-modeled
directorial system, took notice of this phenomenon. Women’s participation in
movie-going, and consumption at large, resulted from the increased number of
women in the urban labor force after World War I (Standish 53;
Wada-Marciano 76). Catherine Russell argues that Shochiku’s woman’s films
in the prewar period are illustrative of the vernacular modernism that
constructed, or tried to construct, modern subjectivities and subjects 16
entangled in the material culture of an everyday life full of sensory
dimensions (60). Through location shooting, the detail of mise-en-scène
represented city life and public and private rituals, as well as the trope of the
moga, the modern girl,17 provokes narrative conflicts within which their final
destiny allegorizes a perspective on the experience of Japanese modernity.
The following sections will examine this taxonomy in order to analyze the
affinities and differences of the female-centered melodramas made in Japan
and those made in taiyu pian.
Shooting on location places emphasis on the physical environment and
creates the realistic atmosphere. Location shooting is the dominant aesthetic
choice in Japanese films (Anderson and Richie 324). In Shochiku’s prewar
melodramas made in the late 1920s and 1930s, the mise-en-scène depicts the
social space to authenticate the urban modern lifestyle and its opposite, the
traditional lifestyle of the country home (Standish 78). Similar visual
symbolism and narrative tropes revolving around the clash between rural and
urban living can be found in taiyu pian melodrama that is evinced by shooting
on location. Two sub-genres of Shochiku’s melodrama at that time address the
city and modern lifestyle in two opposing directions. The depiction of the city
that highlights the “cult of success” (to borrow Isolde Standish’s term) is that
of an appealing land of promise that provides an easy way of life. In the social
realist genre, or what others call shomin-geki genre, transformations to
modernity precipitated by industrial capitalism are treated unfavorably
through their focus on urban desolation and alienation as exemplified by
16
In Hollywood melodrama, it is often the bourgeois subject that is interrogated and criticized as in
the works of Vincente Minnelli and Douglas Sirk.
17
The Japanese equivalent of the term “New Woman” would be shin fujin or atarashiki/atarashii ona
that emerged sometime between the late nineteenth century to the 1910s. The idea of the New Woman
was thought to strongly related to things Western and modern (Lowy 9), and she was the predecessor
of the bobbed-haired, short-skirted moga (the modern girl) in the 1920s who flourished against the
backdrop of consumerism and was “identified with the latest ‘lowbrow’ fads and fashions” (Sato 7).
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Yasujirō Ozu’s work (Standish 42).
The same binary city discourse can also be found in taiyu pian
melodrama. The dialectics between city and country are sometimes framed by
the disintegration of interpersonal relationships and by the migration of youth
to cities, akin to Shochiku’s melodrama in the 1920s and 1930s. In Last Train
from Kaohsiung (dir. Liang Zhe-fu, 1963), a male student from Taipei rescues
a country girl from being sexually assaulted by a villager during a trip to the
countryside, and soon falls in love with her. Likewise, The Dream of
Sorrowful Couples (dir. Wu Fei-jian, 1965) revolves around a disavowed
relationship between a child bride from the countryside and her
father-in-law’s nephew, who has a promising career and bright future in the
city of Keelung. In these films, the city offers boundless opportunities and an
exciting lifestyle, with imagery that conspicuously consists of brilliant neon
lights, high-rise buildings, and bustling streets. Moreover, the city epitomizes
modernity in the contemporary sense, along with the images of railways and
hospitals that denote the legacy of colonial modernity. In a series of
location-shot montages in The Last Train from Kaohsiung, the couple visits
the Dashin Department Store, established in 1958 in Kaohsiung—the first
large-scale department store equipped with an escalator. Department stores
represent a consumption-oriented modern lifestyle, and the novelty of the
escalator and the modern surroundings intrigues the peasant girl. Nevertheless,
Japan’s configuration of modernity still looms large. Dashin’s design is
directly inspired by the modern Japanese department store, manifested by the
interior design and presence of a uniformed service woman, a highly specific
promotional device for Japanese retail (Li 381).
In contrast, films like Unremitted Love (dir. Shao Lo-hui, 1962) and The
Early Train from Taipei (dir. Liang Zhe-fu, 1964) are examples that reveal a
distrustful view of city life as in Shochiko’s social realist genre. In the first
film, the avaricious father of the heroine forces her into marrying the
lecherous táng-su-tiúnn,18 the chairman of his company from Taipei. Even
though she has succeeded in finding her lover and has started a family life in
18
I use the Holo pronunciation to describe this type of character, which literally means the chairman
of a company. This character appears in almost every taiyu pian melodrama and is never given a name.
He is the villain who abuses his power to force a woman (often the female protagonist) whom he likes
to be with him. Often, his plan is implemented with the help of the father of the female protagonist.
Therefore, táng-su-tiúnn arguably represents the repressive power of capitalist patriarchy.
Affinity and Difference between Japanese Cinema and Taiyu pian
87
the mountains, she is abducted and held in the táng-su-tiúnn’s house in Taipei.
She escapes once from the house, but is struck by a car and sent back to the
táng-su-tiúnn. Taipei is a cursed place and is associated with peril, oppression,
and decadence. The Early Train from Taipei sends an even stronger message,
as Taipei represents everything negative in society. The female protagonist
moves to Taipei hoping to earn money to settle her family’s debts, but she
quickly encounters misery. First, she is deceived into being a dance hostess,19
and her transformation into an attractive modern girl makes her the object of
desire and results in her being raped and confined by the táng-su-tiúnn of the
dance club. Her transformation also sabotages her relationship with her lover
in the country, who loves her truly and wholeheartedly. The contrast between
her relationship with the táng-su-tiúnn and with her lover represents the stark
dissonance between the country and the city, or between innocence and
decadence.
Family in crisis, or not
The rural-urban dynamics in taiyu pian melodrama occasionally overlap
with the traditional social structure, but do not always explain the class
barriers of feudalism. In other words, individual economic imbalances are not
always ascribed to the geographic gap. In Love Till Death (dir. Xu Shou-ren,
1967), the son of an affluent family is in love with a lower-class housemaid,
who lives in the same household. Likewise, the two members of the tragic
couple in The Unforgettable Station (dir. Xin Qi, 1965) live in the same
neighborhood, but the heroine’s humiliating past as a hostess whose
occupation was forced on her by her poor, gambling-addicted adoptive father
drives them apart. In Love at All Costs (dir. Wu Fei-jian, 1965), the male
protagonist comes from a rural area, but he is a shaoye, the young master of a
factory owned by his family who are also landowners. In these films, there is
no implied causal logic between class divisions and the modern urban lifestyle;
rather, it is traditional patriarchal oppression that deprives the members of a
family of their individual autonomy. When one’s immediate family aids and
abets an evil-doer, the family is bound to be challenged and overthrown.
19
I use “dance hostess” as the translation for “wunü” in Chinese, referring to women who dance and
serve male customers. The term carries the connotation of prostitution because the profession of
“wunü” in taiyu pian does suggest that the character is implicitly involved in prostitution forcibly or
voluntarily.
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The breakdown of old social institutions typified by family disunity
prevails in Shochiku’s prewar gendai-geki melodrama. Further, two
sub-genres mentioned above display two different attitudes toward the impact
of modernity through their portrayal of the individual-family dynamic. The
optimistic, motivational sub-genre overcomes the Confucian class system by
celebrating individual achievement, while the dystopic social realist genre
laments the family friction that results from industrial capitalism and focuses
on the survivors in their lives on the fringes of the prosperous modern urban
life (Standish 39-42). However, in taiyu pian melodrama, ambivalence about
rapid industrial and social change is weaved into a single narrative. In contrast
to Shochiku’s goal-oriented heroes and heroines, the taiyu pian protagonists
often choose to submit themselves to the authority of traditional social
institutions. In other words, individual resistance to patriarchal oppression is
only transitory and is soon neutralized.
At first glance, the plotline of the love matches in taiyu pian melodrama
seems to promote individualist ideology, but the authority of traditional social
institutions remains intact until it is challenged by a greater power through a
collective act. This sense of collectivism, a model for interpersonal
relationships in a communal society, is deliberately evoked to resolve the
conflict between the individual pursuit of romance and the social mandates
carried out in the family setting. A comparison between the two versions of
The Love-Troth Tree in 1938 and in 1962, and its taiyu pian adaptation, The
Unusual Love, sheds light on the different narrative solutions. This paper will
argue that this adaptation symbolically reflects the specific interpersonal
relationship and family dynamics of 1960s Taiwan, which were shaped by the
island’s economic and social developments.
The 1938 Japanese version of The Love-Troth Tree represents the upbeat
motivation genre in which love conquers all social and economic barriers. In
the original story, the well-educated Kozo is about to inherit his father’s
hospital, but falls in love with a nurse who works there. The female
protagonist, Katsue, returns his love, but conceals the fact that she is a single
mother. Their relationship is met with strong objections from Kozo’s sister
and father, and a marriage between Kozo and Michiko, the daughter of a
wealthy family friend who studied in the United States, is arranged in order to
resolve the hospital’s financial crisis. Kozo declines to accept his father’s
arrangement and decides to elope with Katsue. Unfortunately, Katsue has to
Affinity and Difference between Japanese Cinema and Taiyu pian
89
take care of her sick daughter on the day when she is supposed to leave.
Because Katsue fails to notify Kozo in person before the train departs, he
leaves town feeling betrayed. Thus, neither does Kozo marry Katsue, nor does
he marry Michiko as planned, as Michiko, after being informed of the
intimate bond between Kozo and Katsue, also voluntarily relinquishes any
commitment implied in the arrangement made between them. After a series of
chance happenings and missed meetings, Kozo eventually learns of Katsue’s
secret and her maternal sacrifice. The film implies an optimistic and hopeful
sentiment toward the individualism of modernity: first, the power of ideal love
overcomes the entrenched class system that has been carried over into the
modern age; second, Katsue represents an affirmative and competent single
mother and woman in love (Standish 54-57).
The taiyu pian adaptation of The Love-Troth Tree provides a different
solution to dissolve the barrier between the protagonists, Ho-sam and
Sing-ki.20 Similar to the original version, The Unusual Love begins with
Ho-sam’s return from abroad, but the narrative implies that he was forced to
leave by his father in order to end his relationship with Sing-ki, an ex-nurse
who is now a professional singer. Some of Sing-ki’s former nursing
colleagues invite her to perform at Ho-sam’s welcome-home party, providing
an opportunity for the couple to reunite. However, Ho-sam’s family once
again condemns their union, and this time, he rebels. Halfway through the
scene where he harshly reproaches his family and threatens to leave, his father
yields, but on the condition that Sing-ki disowns her daughter and keeps her
past a secret. The couple consents to the deal and Sing-ki severs all ties with
her daughter.
Ho-sam’s class-conscious protest against his snobbish father is not
effective in vanquishing the interest-oriented patriarchal authority. The
family’s acceptance of Sing-ki, but not her daughter, fortifies the principle of
legitimacy based exclusively on ties of blood. According to Zhang
Chang-yan’s interpretation of this film, Ho-sam’s compliance reflects a
conservative and conformist mindset inculcated by Japanese patriarchal
ideology and the Confucian feudalism imposed by the KMT regime (55).
Quite a few protagonists in taiyu pian melodrama are like Ho-sam, who
hesitates to shift from gemeinschaft to gesellschaft, a personal growth narrated
through the refusal of an arranged marriage to pursue a love match. The male
20
All of the characters’ names in taiyu pian are translated phonetically from the Holo dialect.
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protagonist Tong-san in The Dream of Sorrowful Couples cannot stay true to
his love for the female protagonist. Instead, he feels obliged to comply with
the feudal regulation of ethical responsibility. He considers it unscrupulous to
fall in love with the female protagonist, for she is the fiancée of his cousin; in
addition, he agrees to marry the daughter of his benevolent boss in order to
return his favors. After several narrative twists, Tong-san’s ultimate reunion
with the female protagonist represents a reward for his conformism. On the
contrary, protagonists who insist on breaking traditions are often penalized. In
The Unforgettable Station, Kok-liông becomes mentally ill, and in Love Till
Death, the protagonists’ wedding becomes the bride’s funeral—a harrowing
punishment for two people in love who had shown disrespect to their
differences in class.
Kozo in The Love-Troth Tree resolutely insists on his pursuit of romance
and is unconcerned by the decline of his family’s business, while Ho-sam in
The Unusual Love appears to be more willing to compromise. There is a sense
of inconsistency in Ho-sam’s character between his righteous indignation
against his family’s snobbery and his quick acceptance of his father’s proviso.
Ho-sam’s inconsistency symbolizes an unclear severance with the kinship
corporation, which was the dominant economic body in 1960s Taiwan, where
the means of production were tied to the patrilineal, patriarchal, or household
lines (Gates 178). Ho-sam’s acquiescence, for the sake of sustaining the status
quo, allows his family to control his marital life instead of completing a tale
of the triumph of individualism. Like The Love-Troth Tree, The Unusual Love
evokes the individual’s defiance of social norms, but only ephemerally. It
soon withdraws to affirm the feudal liaison between socially-determining
family occupations and the son’s well-being. As Hill Gates points out, the
roots of petty capitalism based on family lineage can be traced back to
pre-modern China during the Song dynasty (178). Ho-sam’s
capitalist-oriented characterization also differentiates The Unusual Love from
Nakamura’s 1962 version, in which a protest scene against the hospital’s
management suggests a challenge to the exploitation and corruption
underlying Japan’s “economic miracle.” This theme is common to many
young, postwar, Japanese filmmakers (Standish 175). The nurses at Kozo’s
family hospital rally against a profit-oriented, non-humanitarian policy under
the leadership of the acting president, whose father helps to solve the
hospital’s financial crisis.
Affinity and Difference between Japanese Cinema and Taiyu pian
91
There is also a plotline of group resistance in The Unusual Love, but
with different motivations. This resistance is evoked to express disagreement
with individualistic modernity while seeking resolution to the
family-individual conflict. Rather than celebrating the happy promises of
modernity, it issues a critique of family oppression, but not through the trope
of social atomization and alienation as in social realist Japanese films. On the
surface, patriarchal authority seems intact, as the couple is subjugated to it,
but it is readjusted because of collective pressure. In The Unusual Love, the
ending grants a union between Ho-sam, Sing-ki, and her little girl through the
intervention of a group of Sing-ki’s ex-colleagues, who mediate the impasse
between the young couple and Hao-sam’s parents. Despite their low-ranking
position, this group acts collectively to exert pressure on Ho-sam’s family and
furnishes plans for a possible reconciliation between Sing-ki and her
father-in-law. They protect Sing-ki not only because she is a member of the
women’s community, but also because they feel oppressed by the hospital
director, a suitor of Ho-sam’s hostile sister who helps to reinforce the old
social order. The peacemaking efforts of this group suggest a sense of
collective consciousness in terms of gender and class. Throughout the film, a
sense of utopianism arises, not due to the range of possibilities opened up by
promises of individualism, but by this expression of an earlier form of
solidarity that combines social utilitarianism with the feudal patriarchal
authority embodied by Ho-sam’s condescending family.
Utopianism expressed through the pre-modern form of unified
collectivity prevails in taiyu pian melodrama as a way to ease the tension
between the domineering patriarchal family and the protagonist’s individual
pursuits. Interestingly, this sense of solidarity is commonly found among rival
female characters such as in The Unforgettable Station, The Dream of
Sorrowful Couples, The Last Train to Kaohsiung, and The Husband’s Secret
(dir. Lin Tuan-qiu, 1958). It is the mutual understanding of the plight of
women that encourages the heroine’s adversary to withdraw so that the
heroine can fit into the traditional role of the woman as a mother or wife,
without sacrificing her personal desires.
Conservative new woman
The egocentrism of a mother such as Sing-ki in The Unusual Love, who
prioritizes her desires and violates the mother’s code of conduct, is a recurring
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narrative motif in taiyu pian melodrama. This peculiar characterization of the
mother figure deviates from those in Japanese haha-mono, mother films,
which constitute a major sub-genre of postwar gendai-geki melodrama about
contemporary life, aligned closely with Hollywood’s woman’s film. As
outlined by Joseph Anderson and Donald Richie, the mother in haha-mono
leads a despondent life as she suffers for her husband and children. Her
anguish dissolves only when her husband changes, but this rarely happens.
She may also recover her happiness due to her children’s success, yet her
children often have no concept of what she has sacrificed to help them
achieve their goals. In some cases, a single mother must resort to prostitution
to raise her children, but this morally deficient occupation results in contempt
from her children, rather than appreciation. She feels totally betrayed when
her children choose to leave home; therefore, the mother seeks reconciliation
between all her family members, and family restoration is her ultimate
panacea. Drawing from Tatsuhiko Shigeo, Anderson and Richie conclude that
in haha-mono where the mother dominates, “the highest attainment a woman
can reach is becoming a mother” (318-319). It is important to note that this
image of the mother is idolized rather than pitied. The mother character
reflects the feminisuto tradition that underlies the fundamental role of the
mother in Japanese culture, where a woman is expected to suffer
ungrudgingly for virtuous causes. The devoted veneration for a suffering
mother downplays the “individualizing mechanism of the oedipal complex”
and reinforces the attachment between a mother and her children (Russell,
“Insides and Outsides” 146-147). Anderson and Richie also note that the
mother figure in Japanese hana-mono differs from that in Western films in the
degree of physical and emotional attachment that mothers have to their
children (391). Interestingly, the representation of the mother in taiyu pian
melodrama is closer to that found in Western films.
Although Anderson and Richie do not specify any Western films as
examples, the image of the mother in Hollywood’s maternal melodramas in
the 1930s and 1940s can serve as a starting point for us to reconsider the
configuration of the mother character in taiyu pian melodrama. The types of
mothers in taiyu pian melodrama follow the topology used in Hollywood’s
maternal melodramas. They occupy the same moral position as in Hollywood
films, where a bad mother “demands her own life and is punished for the
violation of the desired patriarchal ideal” and a good mother is “nurturing and
Affinity and Difference between Japanese Cinema and Taiyu pian
93
self-abnegating” and often “marginal” (Kaplan 468). The following discussion
examines Stella Dallas (dir. King Vidor, 1937), the most representative text of
Hollywood’s maternal melodrama, to illustrate how mothers in taiyu pian
melodrama are closer to those in Hollywood than in Japanese melodrama.
Similar to the characterization of Helen Morrison in Stella Dallas, the
female protagonists in taiyu pian melodrama represent the ideal mother as
virtuous, loyal, and devoted to their families, although, like Morrison, they are
not the birth mothers. In contrast, the character of the birth mother is similar
to that of Stella, who refuses the designated maternal position and whose
desire exceeds her social status (Kaplan 469; Doane 75). In A Wife and a
Concubine (dir. Wu Feijiang, year unknown)21 and Great Lamentation (Xin
Qi, 1967), Tshiu-hûn and Ing-bí both give up motherhood to fulfill their
pecuniary and sexual desires, respectively. Working as a hostess, Tshiu-hûn
abandons her family and child for an opulent patron, hoping to increase her
social mobility. In Great Lamentation, after losing contact with her missing
husband (who we know is imprisoned in Thailand), Ing-bí is seduced by a
male friend and decides to leave her family and child. Like all of the “bad”
mothers in Hollywood films, both Tshiu-hûn and Ing-bí later return to
motherhood out of self-interest, which, once again, violates the patriarchal
myth of the caring and devoted mother, who, once having left, is supposed to
stay away from her children for good (Kaplan 474). The selfish yet regretful
Tshiu-hûn and Ing-bí are not given the same second chance as Stella, who
resumes the role of the good mother by pushing her child away for the sake of
her daughter. Early in the respective films, Tshiu-hûn and Ing-bíare lambasted
for their inadequacy because of their promiscuity and proclivity toward
consumption; in the second half of these films, they are loathed for their
excessive mothering. In comparison to the “good mother,” they are meant to
be condemned.
If one jointly examines the three abovementioned mother characters,
Sing-ki, Tshiu-hûn, and Ing-bí, all together, it becomes clear that their
characterizations correspond to the general idea of the “new woman” defined
in Japan and other parts of the world: young, middle-class, out of the home,
with a heightened awareness of self and a hope for controlling their own
21
This is a literal translation of the Chinese title, but the story revolves around the fight between the
birth mother (also the ex-wife) and the stepmother (the current wife) over the child. The title suggests
that the male protagonist has never filed for divorce since his ex-wife ran away, but this point remains
irrelevant to the main storyline.
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destiny (Lowy 8). There are shared characteristics among the notions of the
new woman in different cultural contexts, for the emergence of the new
woman is closely related to a modernization that transforms the rural, agrarian
society into an urban and industrial world where women are consequently
given opportunities to work outside the home.
However, the mother character of Sing-ki differs from Tshiu-hûn and
Ing-bí toward the end of The Unusual Love. While all three characters
relinquish their maternal obligations, Sing-ki is given a second chance (like
Stella) to resume her mother role; even better, she successfully regains her
daughter. Tshiu-hûn and Ing-bí, on the other hand, are treated in a more
typical way as erotic objects of desire that need to be punished for being
threatening or destructive. The seemingly inconsistent development of the
character of Sing-ki could be regarded as a combination of the Hollywood and
Japanese paradigms of the mother character. However, I argue that Sing-ki’s
transformation from a “bad mother” to a “good mother” that makes her
distinct from Tshiu-hûn and Ing-bí pertains to the way in which she is
contained within the patriarchal and national discourses as a way to
nationalize and negotiate Western-originated modernity. A similar narrative
structuring device can be found in the treatment of the new woman in
Japanese melodramas, and it is the specific patriarchal and national discourses
in 1960s Taiwan that also make Sing-ki different from Katsue in both the
1938 and the 1962 versions of The Love-Troth Tree.
Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano argues that the characterization of the new
woman in the woman’s film in interwar Japan reflects the nationalization of
and negotiation with Western-originated modernity (84-86). Wada-Marciano’s
argument helps to shed light on the characterizations of Katsue in the 1938
version of The Love-Troth Tree. Katsue in Hiromasa’s 1938 version represents
a utopian combination of the Japanese feministuo tradition and the modern
ideal of a woman who has a sense of self-determination and self-sustainability.
She symbolizes the image of an early version of the new woman prevalent in
the Meiji period, within the parameters of “good wife, wise mother” (Lowy
4-7). Balancing her multiple roles as a mother, lover, and career woman,
Katsue is a feminine ideal that “would contribute to economic growth by
emphasizing frugality, hard work, and productivity along with modesty and
submissiveness” (Nolte and Hastings, quoted in Lowy 4). The same character
in Nakamura’s 1962 version, however, chooses her care-giving duties over her
Affinity and Difference between Japanese Cinema and Taiyu pian
95
career achievements. Katsue’s withdrawal into domesticity in the 1962
version helps to reinstate the dwindling masculine authority in postwar Japan
(Otilia 15).
A gender discourse containing nationalist sentimentalism can also be
found in the portrayal of modern women in taiyu pian melodrama, if we
compare Sing-ki in The Unusual Love with other bad mother figures, such as
Tshiu-hûn in A Wife and a Concubine and Ing-bí in Great Lamentation. The
bad mother figures both aspire to be released from their family constraints and
become some form of new woman who enjoys luxury and freedom. Their
sexuality becomes the primary means by which they feel a sense of
individuality as women existing outside the imposed patriarchal
consciousness. Their untraditional femininity, accentuated by their flaunting
of their sensuality, aggressive personalities, and penchant for material
abundance, erodes masculine power and undermines the traditional family.
Raising her child alone as a working single mother causes Sing-ki to
appear as a modern woman, but in effect, she is passive and self-restrained.
She fits the image of the “new woman” defined by the KMT’s conservative
gender politics: women must be educated, productive, and even
publically-involved.22 Yet, this is done for the well-being of their husbands,
children, families, and the nation. As mentioned above, Sing-ki differs from
Katsue in the 1938 The Love-Troth Tree because her struggle does not contain
an optimistic overtone of individual triumph. In this sense, it can be argued
that she follows the characterization of Katsue in the 1962 version. However,
this similarity is not necessarily a simple imitation. Sing-ki’s compliance with
traditional femininity represents the ideal form of the modern woman
recruited into the Sino-centric national project that resurrected the root values
of Chinese culture while seeking to suppress the anti-Confucian and feminist
spirit developed after the May Fourth Movement. Traditional Confucian
femininity, which exalts the wise mother and good wife and denies female
sexuality, was officially inculcated through education and various forms of
intellectualization projects (Diamond 11-16). Nevertheless, Diamond also
points out that women encountered feelings of ambivalence and frustration
about their roles as mothers and housewives because they involved
22
The gender policy of the KMT appeared to have a feminist sensibility since it advocated women’s
rights to education and to participation in public affairs, but this advocacy of gender egalitarianism
needs to be understood as part of the nation-building project.
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considerable social isolation (22-23). This sense of discontent is reflected in
what drives Ing-bí in Great Lamentation and Tshiu-hûn in A Wife and a
Concubine to leave their families, but the image of the disobedient woman
signals a moment of “the return of the repressed” that cannot always be
contained within the doctrine of the KMT’s gender ideology.
Kaleidoscopic Outlook and Beyond
While some detectable systematic similarities and differences exist
between taiyu pian and Japanese cinema, especially in regard to their
selection of themes and content, the aesthetic qualities of each are hardly
analogous. As was noted at the beginning of this article, film production in
Taiwan was launched during the colonial period as part of the cultural policy
of the colonial regime. While Japanese films matured in the 1950s, at that
point in time, the development of taiyu pian was only at an inception stage.
The knowledge learned from watching international films did not always
successfully translate into knowing how to obtain the right look due to the
general impoverishment of the infrastructure of the equipment and the low
level of technical sophistication in Taiwan at that time (Liao 112). Taiyu pian
was apparently still struggling with how to use cinematically-specific
techniques, such as different shot lengths, camera movement, and editing, to
tell a story effectively. Liao Jin-feng argues that, in general, taiyu pian cinema
bears the stamp of “transitional cinema,” as it hovers somewhere between
narrative-oriented classic cinema and exhibitionistic primitive cinema (134).
For example, even in a narrative feature, it is common for the characters to
break through the cinematic “wall” and directly address the viewer (134). In
discussing the visual style of The Unusual Love, Zhang Chang-yan also
attributes the film’s lack of three-dimensionality and its tableau style to the
director’s aptitude for work for the stage as opposed to film (59-60).
One must bear in mind, however, that taiyu pian does not merely aspire
to adhere to the directives of classical Hollywood cinema. Liao’s argument is
problematic in overstressing the role that the Hollywood paradigm plays in
the aesthetic development of taiyu pian. Given the affinity of taiyu pian for
Japanese cinema, it could be argued that its “retarded” progress reflects a shift
away from the paradigm of classical Hollywood cinema to that of Japanese
cinema. It is not unusual to find characters facing the camera, disjunctive shot
changes, or visual flatness in Japanese cinema. Without sufficient historical
Affinity and Difference between Japanese Cinema and Taiyu pian
97
evidence, it is difficult to pin down the origin of a particular aesthetic choice
in taiyu pian, be it from Japan, Hollywood, the Amoy-dialect, Shanghai, or
the influence of European films. A contingent resemblance is not impossible.
More often than not, one can detect a wide range of stylistic variety
within one single film. For example, in The Husband’s Secret directed by Lin
Tuan-qiu (1958), one of the few prominent film directors professionally
trained in Japan, one can find tangible examples of similarities to Japanese,
Hollywood, and European films. Several scenes are filmed using extremely
long shots of a considerable duration, in which the actors are already part of
the mise-en-scène. These shots encourage the viewer to look at the
surroundings in detail instead of immediately focusing on the main characters
present in the crowd. This emphasis on the social setting that relates the action
to its material context is tinged with a neo-realist look that can also be
recognized in cinema across Europe. However, the camera placement in The
Husband’s Secret is relatively low, sometimes close to the ground, especially
in scenes with a Japanese-styled room setting, and the viewer is immediately
reminded of the films directed by Yasujirō Ozu and Mikio Naruse. Plausible
traces of Hollywood influences can also be found in The Husband’s Secret,
such as the expressionist lighting of film noir and the gangster iconography, as
well as a replicated composition in deep focus as seen in Orson Welles’s
Citizen Kane (1941), wherein the female protagonist lays on the bed in the
foreground as the male protagonist opens the door in the background.
Sometimes, it is difficult to ascertain the exact source of a particular trait of
taiyu pian. For example, scholars hold different views on what influenced the
widespread use of popular songs along with an image track that functions
either as the character’s monologue or a third person commentary. The same
practice can be found in Shanghai film (Hong 61), Japanese film, and the folk
tradition of Ge-zai opera (Wang 10-11). At the end of Hong Guo-juin’s
chapter on taiyu pian, which he terms Taiwanese-dialect cinema, he concludes
that, due to its “unclean severance” from various transnational sources of
external influence, it is, as Andrew Higson notes, “more likely to be either
local or transnational than national” (62).
The use of “either-or” suggests an unavoidable choice between two
alternatives, but Hong does not seem concerned about determining whether
taiyu pian is local or transnational when he invokes Higson to oppose the
qualification of taiyu pian as national cinema. To revise Hong’s conclusion,
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this paper concludes that it is the transnational quality of taiyu pian that
makes it locally specific. What this paper tries to point out, by narrowing the
subject down to a comparative study between taiyu pian melodrama and
Japanese gendai-geki melodrama, is that the attachment to various
international cinemas is affected by political, economic, and social
circumstances. Taiyu pian is not a counter cinema, as is Brazilian Cinema
Novo, in which cannibalism suggests a form of cultural nationalism that
resists imperialism (King 113). The idea of cultural cannibalism, however,
does imply a process of identity formation, and even if the personnel in the
taiyu pian industry were not aware of their act of excessive absorption, a
sense of a distinctive identity did arise. Taiyu pian takes a bit of everything,
mixes it, and creates something unique, it reveals itself to be a partial mimicry,
when compared to all its plagiarized sources. Whether this way of
constructing the sense of self is benign or detrimental is a separate issue;
however, a comparative study between taiyu pian and related international
cinemas, in this case Japanese cinema, can shed some light on the factors and
conditions that affect the decisions on what cinematic themes to adopt and
what to modify.
Affinity and Difference between Japanese Cinema and Taiyu pian
99
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Filmography
Aizen Katsura [The Love-Troth Tree ]. Dir. Hiromasa Nomura. Schockiku,
1938.
Zhangfu de mimi [The Husband’s Secret]. Dir. Lin Tuan-qiu. Yu-feng, 1958.
Zoku Aizen Katsura [The Love-Troth Tree]. Dir. Noboru Hakamura. Schochiku,
1962.
Jiuqing mianmian [Unremitted Love]. Dir. Shao Lo-hui. Yong-da, 1962.
Gaoxiong fa de weibanche [Last Train from Kaohsiung]. Dir. Liang Zhe-fu.
Tai-lian, 1963.
Bupingfan deai [The Unusual Love]. Dir. Zheng Dong-shan. Yuan-da, 1964.
Beiqing yuanyangmeng [The Dream of Sorrowful Couples]. Dir. Wu Fei-jian.
Tai-lian, 1965
Nanwang de chezhan [The Unforgettable Station]. Dir. Xin Qi. Yong-da,
1965.
Ainidaosi [Love Till Death] Dir. Xu Shou-ren. Xin-ya, 1967.
Damou xiaoyi [A Wife and a Concubine] Dir. Wu Fei-jiang. Yong-da, n.d.
Sansheng wunai [Great Lamentation] Dir. Xin Qi. Yong-da, 1967.